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by moron4hire
944 days ago
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> \* realtime collaborative spreadsheet editing
> \* live backing up all my files
These are broadband adoption and bandwidth issues and don't explain why the OS has grown. We had real-time networked apps in 1998. We had networked file-sharing and backups. > \* 28 inch high definition monitor
> \* watching movies in HD
> \* playing almost lifelike games
> \* Running large complex scripts on the same machine I can easily carry in one hand
> \* Running an IDE like JetBrains
These are hardware scaling issues and don't explain why the OS has grown. And we had IDEs in 1998. > \* browsing an extremely hostile internet
Better sandboxing of the browser explains (though only partially) why the browser has grown, but doesn't explain why the OS has. If anything, the browser grew (in functionality and thus size) because the OS didn't (in functionality), so why did it (in size)? |
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Because the same kind of sandboxing happens on OS level now as well. In Windows 9X days the apps could access the hardware directly but not anymore for safety and security. Everything is now layers upon layers of sandboxing that must talk to the HW via APIs.
>because the OS didn't (in functionality)
Didn't it though? Or are we being needlessly snarky?
I don't remember Win 98 having on-line automatic OS update and automatic driver update, firewall, heuristic anti-malware, DirectX 12 support(check the featurelist compared to DX 5), support for multi-core 64bit CPUs, PAEX, NVME SSDs, WiFi, multiple high-dpi screens, virtualization(Hyper-V), USB4 & Thunderbolt, accelerated fancy transparency in the GUI, etc.
Yes, some of those features are hardware related, but having the OS support all those new HW features and exposing it reliably and securely it to the userspace adds bloat in from of binary code that makes all that work seamlessly.
All of those features and support for all that newer faster hardware, are a given now but were unheard of in consumer OS back then when PCs had the complexity of a toaster by comparison.
So let's stick to the facts, not emotionally driven rose tinted glasses.
> so why did it (in size)?
Because as HW became powerful and cheaper, it made it less profitable for SW companies to hyper optimize everything like they were dong in the Win9X days with assembly and stuff. It would be a needless expense that brings no ROI.
Yeah Win11 is needlessly overbloated compared to WinXP, but people said the same about WinXP when it launched, compared to Win98, and they said the same about Win95 when it launched, compared to DOS. Where does the buck stop? At the Altair 8800? Pretty sure that had no bloat.